Raid! (Song of Arthur & Merlin)

Played a game of Song of Arthur & Merlin the other night with Sebastian. This an Athurian skirmish game using Ganesha Games' Song of Blades & Heroes engine.  This consists of rolling one to three dice against a figure's "Quality" score (usally 3+).  Every success result gives you an action to spend (move, shoot, attack in melee, etc).  However, if you roll two failures, it is a turnover, and you turn ends immediately and your opponent may begin making activation rolls.  This flip-flopping turn structure is the heart of the game, as that if you roll only one dice to activate, you will not get a turnover, but will have less actions to spend. 

 

We were playing the "Raid" scenario, where each side tries to obtain and get away with herds or treasure tokens.  I had acquired some plastic sheet and based them two-to-a-base, so we were stealin' sheep.  Each side had a 300 point roster consisting of five basic warriors, a champion, and a leader. I was playing axe-wielding  Irish, and Sebastian fielded Saxons.  All figures are by Old Glory. The sheep are by Ertl.

 

The game took about an hour and a half, which was probably uncommonly long due to explanations and some rule searching by me (mainly regarding the control of sheep). There were six herds of sheep, and the Saxons had obsconded with three and the Irish with two. Sebastian killed one of my Irish warriors, but my chieftain slew his warlord, which in turn triggered a warband-wide morale check which caused his champion and a warrior to flee the field. This left him with one warrior on the table (three Saxon warriors and two Irish had already left the table with thier stolen sheep). At this point I was still trying to get one sheep herd off the table. The lone Saxon made a dash and, for a second, did actually wrest control of the sheep to himself. But the Irish snagged them back and made good their getaway.

Each sheep marker is worth 3 VP. So 9 to 9. Figures are 1 VP for every 50 points they cost. The slain Irish warrior costs 32 points or thereabouts, so that nets 0 VP. The Saxon warlord was like 70 points, so that gives the Irish the narrow win with 10 to 9 VPs.
 

I think we'll try it again. Probably use a bridge scenario called "None Shall Pass" and up the warbands from 300 to 400-500 points (basically add 3-6 more warriors per side). Maybe try some world-building, too. Make a little cartoony map and show where the sheep raid took place. Then add where the bridge is and say that the bridge battle is one of side trying to cut off the escaping sheep raiders. The campaign system in the book has dice rolls to determine whether slain figures were really slain or just wounded and can recover and play in the next game, so we could do that too…

Fleetwood's Regiment of Foot

Here are 12 pikemen (including 3 command figures) and 16 shotte comprising a "regiment" of foot for play in English Civil War scenarios.  These are all Warlord Games 28mm plastic figures.  They are wearing orange jackets because I wanted to put a unit (of any gunpowder era) in orange, and this ended up being the one since information on unit colors during the English Civil War is sketchy.  The flag is idenitified as "Colonel Fleetwood's Regiment" and a Parliamentarian flag, so I guess this is a Parliamentarian unit (although I will probably downsize the flag by about 50%).

These are based individually on metal washers. I have card with magnet paper glued on which make movement trays.

Parliamentarian officers favored orange sashes and Royalists ones favored red. This means orange might be an appropriate color for a Parliamentarian infantry unit but also means I put its colonel in a red sash by mistake (third from left, front row).

The banner is mounted on an extra thick styrene rod instead of the banner provided on the sprue. It looks like he's carrying a small tree trunk if you look closely but it means the banner won't snap off too easily (as has happened to me before).  The pikes are also quite brittle but you can cement them back together in a pinch.

Not a fan of the lack of poses with Warlord Games plastics. You get different hats but that's about all you can really do to vary the poses. The musket poses are either firing or marching/advancing. It'd be nice to have a loading or at-ease type pose to use as the second row behind the firing poses.

Beowulf and Retinue Action Poses

Here are the 13 figures from Eureka Miniatures' Beowulf & Retinue Set #2 Action Poses (100DAK04).  These are cast in pewter, I think.  You get Beowulf (up front on the bigger base, 'course), his two bodyguards (the fellas just behind Beowulf. in full head-to-toe chainmail), a "Germanic" companion with a fearsome double-handed axe (far left), a shirtless "strongman" companinion (far right), a "Moorish" spearman companion, a "shield maiden" with sword, and so forth and so on – basically every figure is sculpted to be a "character" figure of some sort. A decent number of them rank up very nicely as a shieldwall. These also rank up nicely with other Dark Age figures so you can blend a lot of them into other units.  The Beowulf figure makes a great warlord figure for pretty much any SAGA faction, and the strongman and Germanic companion could easily be champions in an Irish SAGA warband.

 

These were pretty easy to paint given that almost everyone is wearing chainmail.  I painted these simultaneously with my Old Glory Arthurian Saxons, and it was interesting to compare the pewter versus the lead figures by Old Glory. I assume it is the lead which allows the Old Glory figures to have much deeper cuts in their sculpts – especially with faces and hair.

The Moorish companion is in the back on the above photo. The "shield maiden" is in front of him.

Welsh Bowmen

These 24 Welsh archers were the easy to paint on account of the  general lack of gear. As you can see, the majority of the figures wear a tunic and little else. When you do not have to paint chainmail or shields (or even pants, for that matter) the process is greatly expedited! These are from the 30 figure set ("Welsh Bowmen" set number DA-22) by Old Glory Miniatures, which comes with 5 poses in 25mm, but sadly no head variants.

I'm a fan of the pose where the fella has one end of his bow on the ground.

Another amusing feature is that all but one of the poses is not wearing on shoe on one foot. This is a reference by the sculptor to a 13th century illustration of a Welsh archer. Historians do not quite know what to make of this depiction. It did originate from London, so one has to suspect the intrusion of metropolitan (as it were) attitudes about the provinces by the artist.

These fellas have not seen a lot of use on the table. The Welsh in SAGA carry javelins which precludes the necessity of having a ranged unit like archers in your warband a bit. I anticipate using them as Anglo-Dane levy archers, however.

"Cozy little village you got here. Y'know, Northumbria's a dangerous place. Be a shame if anything happened to your village. Real shame."

Red vs. Black - a Drum & Shakos Large Battle tryout

I wanted to get my experimental "freelance Napoleonic" 54mm figures in use but also wanted to try another horse and musket era ruleset. All the King's Menis a clean and simple ruleset designed specifically with 54mm figures in mind, but the activation system (drawing playing cards) is a bit limiting. For one thing, there are no group activations and this tends to isolate units with the result that action tends to become centered around one or two units who are the fray and other units (which you did not move earlier) end up forgotten at the edges. 

I'd read the Black Powder rules and at least those have the option for group orders and movement, but I have also recently become more aware of the large family of skirmish rules based on the Song of Blades & Heroes "engine".  This led me to purchase the PDF version of the relation Drums & Shakoes: Large Battles on the inkling it could be adapted to 54mm. 

The first conversions were easy enough: DS:LB features infantry battalions of four stands with a width-to-depth ratios of 3:1 with about 3 or 4 figures per stand.  This translates pretty easily into the AtKM standard of 12-man infantry units. Cavalry are two stands of the same width as infantry stands, which will give you a four-figure cavalry unit (which is an immediate economy over AtKM's six-figure cavalry units).  DS:LBuses a VS-S-M-L movement scale (similar to SAGA) which I translated into 3"-6"-8”-12".  Artillerty is DS:LB is two stands per battery with one gun each – this caused a slight problem because I have only three guns completed at this point. For the purposes of figuring out the rules I used a single gun.

I really like D&S:LB!  The reaction moves created a nice simulation of simultaneous movement, with both sides' front lines drifting towards each other at roughly the same speed.  The group activations were also nice, with the red side in particular being able to move thier left flank up in an orderly fashion.  The 12-figure single file line formation took some getting used to visually, but make the line tactics and formations more in your face.  I went through a few combats and they were interesting. Red was able to drive back Black, but in one case Red took more disorder markers than Black (there is no figure removal), so I thought that was a different take on things (victorious at a cost).

9th Century Irish Warriors with Axes and Command

Here are 27 "9th Century Irish Warriors with Axes and Command" (set number SVS-05) in 25mm scale by Old Glory Miniatures.  The bag comes with 30 figures: there are 24 of the two handed axe wielders (five poses with head variants), plus one standard bearer (with a separate wicker shield), a horn, and a warlord (the set comes with two each of the "command" figures). 

The head variants are I believe cast separately, and possibly attached with solder? The heads are not only different but faced in various directions. You can also slightly twist the axe head's orientation which helps the overall pose seem more sensible. The horn and standard bearer figures plus one of the axemen poses wear a sort of short fringed poncho which allows you to break that group out as elite bodyguards or noble warriors if you want. 



When painting I used a lot of yellow because I found internet references to Irish warriors favoring clothes dyed saffron.  I also experimented a bit with painting red hair.

For SAGA I have not actually used these fellows much – I don't have the Irish supplemental information (yet) and would probably need some other figures to round out a warband. I have used small groups of them as Welsh hearthguard on occasion, and I use the warlord as a Welsh warlord all the time. I do anticipate fielding them as medium infantry in a non-skirmish big battle ruleset sometime soon, however.